Black Box blog is dedicated to providing insight in the record management and information management knowledge world.

Thursday, 16 August 2012

What really needs to be a ‘record’

Most companies follow the all or nothing policy; they either retain everything or they retain nothing. Although the former is way better than the latter, retaining all of your ‘records’ puts you in a big mess here in Dubai and the Middle East.

Not everything needs to be a record; more importantly not every record needs to be physical, digital or even available at all times. In order for records management to be beneficial for a company — rather than time consuming and expensive — it needs to have a strict system in place that allows for a more efficient retrieval or storage system. One that works like clockwork and does not leave anything unaccounted for.

For this to be possible, one needs to design and implement a strict retention, storage, archival and retrieval system. This requires that every employee should know and correctly mark which document needs to be stored as a record in the first place. The same employees also need to know about what document needs to be marked with which retention date as well. This allows for document destruction at the right time which leads to better efficiency and records management.

The key to running an efficient data and records management system is to time correctly the form of a document/record from physical to digital and then to digital archival or physical archival; the rest simply need to be destroyed. Destroying unnecessary documents as per the retention schedule allows for more space and the storage of only those documents and records that is necessary.

We at BlackBox provide records management consulting in Dubai and provide all the necessary services such as storage, management and scanning services in Dubai as well. We feel that document management is best left to the experts and when outsourced to a third-party provider as it keeps all documents from employees on a need-to-know basis and keeps them away from prying eyes as well.